Slighted love or, At her heart's expense
“Do not mind this hard-hearted old woman, dear. I love you and so does
Ralph, and when we are married we want you to be our guest for as long
as you will stay. And in the meantime we have a plan to propose to you.”
The pathetic dark eyes turned on her in grateful wonder.
Alexie continued tenderly:
“You will wish to leave here as soon as you can. Do you know where you
will go?”
“I--I--have not decided yet,” Italy gasped.
“Then I think Ralph’s plan is a good one. You see, he is boarding with
a nice, quiet old lady in Boston while his folks are abroad. This old
lady is quite a lady indeed, but in reduced circumstances, and takes a
few boarders to eke out a genteel support. The family is small, herself
and a daughter lately widowed. She has Ralph and a few other boarders,
all good people. It is quite near us, too, which is another reason why
I want you to go and board with this old lady, for then I could come
and see you so often, dear.”
“You are a darling to plan everything for me like this. I will go to
the old lady, and a thousand thanks to you,” Italy sobbed gratefully.
Italy’s two devoted friends removed her the next day from The Lodge to
her pleasant new home in Boston.
Mrs. Murray remained cold and unrelenting to the last, and returned no
reply to the brief note of thanks and farewell that Italy sent to her
by her maid. She stayed closely shut in her own room until Italy had
left the house, and heard with vindictive pleasure the crunching of the
carriage wheels that bore her away.
And yet Mrs. Murray was not a mean or unprincipled woman. She had only
been led astray by blind prejudice and the evil counsels of interested
friends. She knew in her heart that Italy Vale was beautiful, pure, and
good, and in consenting to receive her into the household at The Lodge
she had put aside selfish prejudice and acted from a high sense of
womanly duty combined with pity.
But her pride and prejudice had both taken serious alarm as she noted
the interest that her son was taking in his protégée. This alarm
skilfully fostered by the scheming Mrs. Dunn and her crafty niece,
Alys, had developed into actual dislike and jealousy of the hapless
orphan girl.
But as she listened to the grinding carriage wheels and exulted in
Italy’s departure, the still, small voice of conscience was murmuring
in her breast, although she tried to drown it. She knew that Italy was
not to blame for Francis Murray’s death, if he were really dead, and
she knew that if he returned he would censure her course in turning
adrift on the world the lonely orphan who but a month ago had come to
Winthrop pleading for a mother’s love to replace that which she had
lost.
Alas! the world is but a cold, bleak place to a friendless orphan
girl, and those who should love her most often goad her to despair by
harshness or indifference. Mrs. Murray’s heart had shut itself against
poor Italy, and she resolutely stifled the accusing voice of her
sensitive conscience. But in Italy’s heart there was no resentment for
Mrs. Murray’s course. Her heart was full of pain and sympathy for the
sadly bereaved mother.
“Oh, that I might imbue her with some of my sanguine faith that Mr.
Murray is not dead, and that he will yet return!” she exclaimed often,
yet as weeks went on with no tidings she, too, began to lose heart of
hope.
It was far into October now, and the autumn leaves were turning from
red and gold to russet-brown and whirling through the chilly air; the
nuts were ripe in the woods, and in the city streets people began to
appear in warm clothing and furs; and Italy remembered that it was in
the waning days of the bright summer that she had gone on that fatal
little sailing trip with Francis Murray--far back in the last of summer
since she had heard his voice, full of love and yearning, calling her
“love,” “darling,” then fading out into the silence of a terrible
mystery.
She awoke one stormy midnight, weeping, from a dreadful nightmare dream
in which she had seen Francis Murray lying dead and cold upon the beach
at Winthrop. It was storming wildly outdoors, and the noise had seemed
to her, in her sleep, like the rush of waves that threw that pallid,
drowned corpse at her feet.
Italy flung herself, in her dream, upon the cold, dead form and kissed
the glorious face that she had never kissed in life--kissed the closed
eyes, the marble-white brow, the cold, stiff lips that had called her
in that last, supreme moment, “love,” “darling.”
“Oh, I love you, I love you!” she cried out to the dead, and then she
awoke, weeping wildly.
She heard the wild rain swirling against the windows, and the gale
shrieking around the corners of the streets. In the darkness she groped
her way to the window and looked through the curtains into the street.
By the white electric lights she saw the swirling sheets of rain go
dashing past, swept by the cyclonic force of the wind, and the branches
of the leafless trees bending and writhing and snapping off as though
in the embrace of a gigantic monster. With a shudder she dropped the
curtains together and crouched miserably upon the floor, her face in
her hands.
“Oh, how dreadful it is, how dreadful--yet not so terrible as my
dream!” she moaned. “Oh, is he dead, dead, and lost forever? Or did I
wrong him with my wild suspicions? Was he noble and true, as he seemed?
Who, then, was the fiend that murdered my father? Not Francis Murray,
ah, no, no, no! Let me do him justice, now that he is dead. He was not
the fiend I came here to find. He was noble, godlike, and I--loved him.
Yes, I loved him from the first hour we met. I realize it now, in the
darkness of my great despair.”
She thought of the bereaved mother, alone and lonely in the splendid
home at Winthrop, and her heart yearned over her.
“God pity her, God comfort her!” she sobbed. “Ah, no wonder she
execrates me! Through me she lost her noble son. Why did I ever come
under her roof, and bring with me the doom of that tragedy? What have I
accomplished? Nothing--less than nothing. I have wronged a true heart
by a monstrous doubt, and through me he came to his death. And I am
just as far as ever from keeping my vow to clear my mother from that
dark cloud of shame! Oh, my dearest one, how could I ever meet you
again, even in heaven, if I had broken faith with you! No, no, I cannot
go to you, my vow binds me here!”
CHAPTER XII.
THE BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WIDOW.
As Italy crouched there, weeping in wild abandon, she heard a door
open, lower down the hall, then footsteps coming along, accompanied by
the crying of an infant.
The footsteps stopped at her door, there was a light rap, then a
woman’s voice said deprecatingly:
“I beg pardon, Miss Vale, but I heard you up. May I speak to you?”
“One moment,” answered Italy. She hurriedly lighted her gas, threw on
her dressing-gown, and opened the door to Mrs. Mays, her landlady, who
entered with the crying infant in her arms.
“My dear, I beg a hundred pardons, but my daughter is taken suddenly
very ill with convulsions, and there is not another lady in the house
that I can appeal to for help. The nurse left to-day, and the baby
cannot stay in bed with its sick mother. It is crying from loneliness
and cold. Will you, my dear, let it lie in bed with you to-night while
I attend to my daughter?”
“Certainly,” Italy answered, taking the screaming bundle of flannel and
lace rather gingerly into her arms, “but, dear me, Mrs. Mays, how can I
stop its crying?”
“It will stop itself as soon as you get into bed, and let it snuggle up
close on your arm and get warm. You see, it has been used to sleeping
with its mother and in the dark, but her restless tossings and the
light in her room keep it awake and sick. Do the best you can with it,
my dear, and God bless you!” cried Mrs. Mays, hurrying from the room,
while Italy locked the door, lowered the light, and crept into bed with
her wee charge that, sure enough, as soon as it became conscious of the
warmth and the darkness, cuddled close within her warm arm and fell
asleep.
“Poor little girlie,” murmured Italy, with that rush of tenderness
every womanly heart feels for helpless infancy.
But the chances are that had Italy guessed whose child lay on her arm
she would have recoiled from it with something near akin to loathing.
Italy had been an inmate of this pleasant boarding-house almost two
months, but she had never seen Mrs. Mays’ widowed daughter nor heard
her name, although she knew that she was very young, and had been
suddenly widowed in barely a year after marriage.
For two months she had been ill, and since the birth of her child, six
weeks before, her life had been almost despaired of. But in the last
few days she had shown signs of rapid improvement, and the sick-nurse,
having another engagement, had left the invalid to her mother’s care.
It was most sad to think of the hapless young mother widowed so
suddenly before her child was born, and Italy’s heart swelled with
grief and pity for the fatherless babe.
In the pretty parlor down-stairs was a lovely crayon of a young girl
with dark hair and eyes, and a wilful, pouting mouth, and Mrs. Mays had
told her one day that it was her daughter Isabel.
“Taken when she was at boarding-school just a few weeks before she ran
off to marry a dissipated scamp. Yes, he was a scamp, Miss Vale, or he
would have asked my consent, and not carried her off in that fashion,
almost breaking my heart, for Isabel was my only daughter, and I loved
her better than life. But perhaps he knew I would refuse, for though he
was handsome and had a little money, he had a bad reputation as a fast
man, and I would not have let my child marry him for wealth untold. But
she married him without my consent, and I never forgave her till after
his death, when she came home to me broken-hearted.”
The little babe slept sweetly, the storm muttered on outside, and
Italy, too much disturbed to sleep, lay among the pillows thinking,
thinking, till her brain seemed to burn.
She was glad that she could at last believe Francis Murray innocent of
the sin of which she suspected him. Her heart had rejected the belief
all the while, and now reason came to her aid. It could not be true.
She had been mad to cling to that ignoble suspicion, after she had
seen and known him in all the quiet nobility of his daily life.
“I wronged that grand soul, and may Heaven forgive me!” she sobbed.
A new plan had been forming in her mind for days, and she suddenly
resolved to carry it out.
Lawyer Gardner had been back in Boston some time, but as she was
comfortably situated with Mrs. Mays, she had never opened communication
with him, fearing his disapproval of the object that had brought her to
America. But now rendered desperate by failure and hopelessness, Italy
resolved to seek his sympathy and advice.
“I will go to him this day,” she resolved firmly.
A little after daylight Mrs. Mays came for the child.
“Isabel is better, much better,” she said. “To tell you the truth, Miss
Vale, it was partly hysteria that ailed her. She got to weeping over
her dead husband, and then there was no controlling her nerves until
the violence of her grief wore out her strength. She is calmer now, and
begging for the baby. Thank you for keeping it so long for me.”
She went away with the sleeping babe, and then Italy fell into a long
sleep that lasted until she was aroused by the breakfast-bell.
She rose and made a careful street toilet.
“The sun is shining after the storm--a happy omen,” she said; “I will
go to Mr. Gardner after breakfast.”
She went down and had her morning meal with Ralph Allen and the only
other boarder, a grim professor of Greek, who hurried out as soon as he
had bolted his meal.